


yer a wizard bucky

by silentwalrus



Series: MORGUE FILES [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Abandoned Work - Unfinished and Discontinued, Alternate Universe - Magical Realism, Body Horror, IT IS ABANDONED HEAVILY FRAGMENTED AND DISCONTINUED, M/M, THIS IS A MORGUE FILE, Witch Bucky, witch everybody else too tho i guess
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-27
Updated: 2017-10-27
Packaged: 2019-01-23 19:43:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,308
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12515116
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/silentwalrus/pseuds/silentwalrus
Summary: cause of death: i tried to go in 9 directions at once and couldn't reconcile any of them. i ended up making bucky a magical mary sue, had ZERO idea where to go with steve, and what the fuck was the climax of the story gonna be, tbh. plus a whole raft of internal logic consistency problems. Enjoy!





	yer a wizard bucky

**Author's Note:**

> when i say this is fragmented, i ain't fucking kidding. if it seems like the sentences are cutting off halfway through or skipping lines at a time, it's because they are. this whole caboodle was written... 2 yrs ago? 3? Anyway, long fucking time. Godspeed.

“Hey Steve. Steve. Steeeeeeeeevie. Steven.  _ Steve.” _

“Bucky. I’m tellin’ you. If you show me one more icicle shaped like a two-foot johnson--”

“--you’ll laugh like you did the last four times, don’t lie. Nah. Take a look, Stevie, c‘mon, look around. Look at me.”

Steve blinks up from his butcher paper doodling and leans around the kitchen table to look for Bucky, who’s been fooling around with some spell on the floor. He isn’t there anymore. “Well, I’m looking,” Steve says, grumpy at being interrupted. “Where are you?”

Bucky snickers, and it sounds like he’s still right there in the kitchen with him. Steve really hopes his good ear isn’t going, because the kitchen’s not exactly big enough to hide Bucky, who at sixteen is already too big and  _ still growing _ . “That’s the point,” Bucky’s voice says, eager. “Can’t see me, can ya?”

“Did you-- was  _ that  _ the spell you were screwing with?” Steve demands, and Bucky’s laugh floats out of the air. He’s completely invisible, sounds like he’s standing right in front of Steve. “God damn, Buck, where’d you learn that?”

“Ma taught it to me and Becca last week. Couldn’t get it right ‘til now, no time for peace and quiet. Good, huh?”

“Good,” Steve echoes, as Bucky flickers into view, grinning like a loon. Bucky’s good at magic. He’s no kind of great mage, but he soaks up new spells like a sponge and he can do a fair bit with them. He’s got a gift for handling water; he spins huge, elaborate snowflakes for his baby sisters and dries wet clothes with a wave of his hand. 

Steve isn’t much of a mage at all. His mam is a hedgewitch healer and his da had apparently had some fire magic, but the most Steve can do is call some light up, a gentle, sunny glow around his palms and chest. It doesn’t last more than a few minutes, though, because magic needs power, will and control, and while Steve has plenty of the second and some of the third, the first just isn’t in him. His body can’t spare the energy for more than a little spark. 

That’s alright. Most people don’t have any magic at all, and they get by just fine. Bucky’s family just spends a little less time doing laundry than most, and as for Steve, well, if his mam hadn’t been a healer then he’d have corked it before he was out of short pants, but it’s not like it worked any miracles. 

On the magic front he’s not so unusual, really: it’s far rarer for someone to be a great mage like Teddy Roosevelt or Al Capone. The best mage Steve knows is Bucky’s ma: Winifred Barnes, founder and proprietor of Winifred’s Charms on Flatbush Avenue.

So Bucky’s pretty good at it, too. “So,” Steve says, leaning back in his chair and flexing his drawing hand a little. “How long until you use this to hide out in the ladies’ changing rooms at Coney Island?”

Bucky props his hands on his hips, leaving chalk smudges on the dark fabric of his pants. “Steven Grant, you think I need to act a pervert to see a girl with her clothes off? With _this_ face?” 

“This face?” Steve says innocently, tilting his paper just a bit, and Bucky’s eyes go wide and he crowds over and starts laughing, helplessly, at how Steve’s drawn him staring pompously at the viewer, wearing a frilly cravat and an enormous powdered French wig. Steve pushes another piece of paper forward and Bucky bends double cackling: this one’s him with a Salvador Dali mustache. 

  
  


Steve waits at the mouth of the alley as Bucky pets the cats; any closer and he’s like to start wheezing and itching. There’s only two this time, thank god. Bucky treats every single cat like a damned princess-- where no one can see, anyway-- and Steve’s seen him spend upwards of forty minutes in alleys, just  _ petting cats. _ It’s an excellent defense for when Bucky complains about Steve’s “radicalized political lecturing”. Ass.  

At least cats like him back. “Watch out or you’ll end up with a familiar, Barnes,” Steve grumbles, leaning against the brick wall. 

“I wish,” Bucky says, grinning as the brown cat puts its paws on his chest and starts shoving his chin with its face. Bucky’s gonna have to wash all over when they get home. “Nah, this ain’t the kinda pussy that follows me around.”

“You’re all class,” Steve says without heat, and Bucky glances at him and gives his two cats one last stroke, carefully detaching the brown one from his chest. “C’mon, let’s go,” Bucky says, but he’s strangely distant the rest of the way home-- he’s laughing and talking, of course, but Steve can tell when Bucky’s mouth is running with his brain behind it and when his head is off cartwheeling in space. 

When Bucky gets like this Steve wants to just peel his head open and get it out of him  _ right now, _ but he’s learned to let it simmer. Bucky pretty much always tells him eventually. 

But Bucky doesn’t tell him anything, and Steve forgets about it until Bucky starts acting strange. 

Here’s the secret: Bucky is a quiet person. He rags on Steve sometimes for having his nose in a book all the time but Bucky’s the goddamn same-- he just thinks he has to hide it. He thinks he has to hide a lot. Steve, who hasn’t the energy to hide a goddamn thing and probably wouldn’t if he could, is mystified, but he doesn’t say a word when Bucky pulls his smile on, laughs loud, talks nonstop in company and pours out jokes like a gushing fountain. Everybody knows James Barnes is the life of the party, a charmer, the star of the goddamn show. 

Bucky isn’t like that around Steve. He talks and laughs, sure, but more often they sit quiet together, in the apartment or in the park or on a roof, reading side by side. Bucky _ likes  _ doing his homework, Bucky  _ likes _ reading, he  _ likes _ messing around on the floor with spells for hours on end, the only sounds between them coming from Steve’s pencil and Bucky’s chalk and somebody’s radio outside floating in through the window. 

So when Bucky starts laughing louder, cracking jokes, dragging them out to meet people every other night, Steve knows something’s wrong. 

  
  


“Stop  _ performing,” _ Steve snaps. “What the hell’s wrong with you, Buck?

  
  
  
  
  
  
  


And then, the war. 

 

Of course Bucky is one of the first to get called up. Big, healthy, and a mage too? They snap him up first chance they get. He reports a week after he gets his letter and after that he has barely a day to get his things packed; the Army appraiser had gotten real excited, apparently, when Bucky had made himself disappear. They were sending him to Basic as fast as the damn train could go. 

  
  


“They gave me special training,” Bucky whispers, late that night. “They liked that I could go invisible, make myself look like someone else. They liked it a lot. Some of the guys in my unit, they can do the same-- one guy can make it look like there’s three of him, all moving separately like different people, it’s unbelievable. 

  
  
  


“The procedure is designed for the body alone, but what is magic if not part of the body? And this is, of course, completely untested science,” Erskine says absently, pushing his spectacles up his nose as he paints careful sigils in Steve’s own blood on Steve’s palms. “I am most curious to see if it will affect your magic.” 

“Not sure there’s enough there to affect,” Steve says drily. He’s trying not to shiver, shirtless in this cavernous underground room. “You saw my glowworm impression. That’s the most I can do.”

“Ah, well, even if it is just a spark,” Erskine says meditatively. “We shall see. Let this dry, Steven, I will be back in just a moment.”

And Steve’s left alone to resist the urge to scratch the itchy drying blood on his body. He just stares at the sigils for a while, complicated and spiky. He’s got no frame of reference for how bad this is going to be, he’s blank of expectation; the buildup to this has been so drawn-out that he’s mostly just numb. 

It’s  _ really _ cold in here. 

 

For a procedure claiming to be purely science there sure is a lot of ritual here. 

 

The coffin slides closed around him. 

 

Steve remembers, later, that his heart stopped. He’s used to paying attention to it, monitoring its weak and irregular beating, so he knows what it was, that moment of seizure and stillness. He knows his heart stopped beating for a good handful of seconds before his mind whited out completely. 

He also knows, his mam told him, that you’re not dead until you’re brain-dead  _ and _ heart-dead. His heart stopped but his brain stuck around, clearly, and then his heart started again. He was just unconscious, that’s all, for that endless handful of seconds where he knew nothing at all. He knows this. 

He just can’t shake the feeling that something died there, too. 

  
  


He wants Schmidt  _ off _ of him, he wants him  _ gone _ , he wants him away from Bucky with all the force of his brand new body, and the rage bursts out of him like an erupting volcano.

It’s not a spark anymore. It’s a god damned inferno, and Steve’s only barely at the reins. Schmidt gets thrown back, but Steve does too: it’s like a grenade went off between them, like an explosion tore out of Steve’s body. He rolls to his feet, slightly stunned but ready to get back into it, and sees golden fire coursing up his arms. 

His moment of shock is enough for Schmidt’s lackey to hit the bridge controls and get them away from each other. Then Schmidt pulls his face off, and for a second Steve is certain that the golden flames-- painless, ferocious-- are going to burn him alive, too, scour him raw and then char him to ash, the price for this body, the magic out of control-- 

\--but by the time he realizes the heat doesn’t burn, it’s too late: Schmidt and his little man are gone. 

  
  
  


He’d been equally anxious and elated for them to meet, because they were the two most amazing people alive, but Bucky could have a territorial streak and Peggy didn’t seem like a gal with the patience for Bucky to prove himself if he fucked up first. But apparently they’d worked something out in the past thirty-six hours, somewhere away from Steve. 

He guesses it’s a mage thing, probably. Steve knows Peggy can do what Bucky does, make herself into other people, make herself disappear, but he’s very sure that isn’t all of it, just as he’s very sure it’s classified to hell and back and not for him to know. 

  
  
  


“Well,  _ clearly _ you can do magic now,” Bucky says impatiently, waving a hand. “We need to find out how much.” 

“Assess your capabilities,” Peggy says. There’s a dangerous spark of amusement in her eye. “As the only SSR agents currently on base with magical specialization and clearance, Sergeant Barnes and I are here to determine what you can do--”

“--and teach you what you can’t,” Bucky says. “Show me what you got, Steve.”

Steve glares at him as he lights up. It comes easier every time, like the fire is living closer and closer to the inside of his skin. 

Peggy and Bucky both look him over, with equally unimpressed looks on their faces; Bucky goes so far as to circle him, his hands on his hips. “Okay, off,” he says, and Steve pulls the fire back in. “Now light it just in the palm of your hand.”

Steve frowns at his hand, but sticks it out obediently and calls the fire. His whole arm bursts into flames. And his shoulders, and back, and-- yep, it’s all of him on fire. He tries again; the ground chars a little under his boots. 

“Not unexpected,” Peggy says thoughtfully, and Steve’s about to snap something when he realizes she’s talking to Bucky. “No training and he was, in some ways, quite literally born yesterday. Or this year, at any rate. Fine control will come with practice-- you said you threw fire at Schmidt?”

That last  _ is  _ for Steve. “Sort of,” he admits, pulling the fire back in again. “It felt like it, anyway-- threw both of us away from each other.”

“And that was the first manifestation of your magic?”

“Yeah. Well, the fire. I could do light before - “

“But this was the first expression after the procedure.”

“Yes.”

“Okay, distance,” Bucky says, walking several yards away and scribbling a quick circle on the ground with his ever-present chalk. “First, try to light a fire inside the circle--  _ without _ coming over here, genius. Then we’ll try throwing it.”

Steve tries. And tries. And keeps trying. The most he achieves is sending the flames roaring up more than three feet up from the crown of his head and blackening the cement under his boots, but making the inferno  _ bigger  _ is the opposite of what they’re asking. 

“Don’t worry,” Peggy says cheerfully. “This is exactly what we expected. We didn’t tell you  _ how _ to do any of it, after all. Magic isn’t just wishing really hard until something happens--”

Steve stops dead, astonished. “It’s not?” 

Bucky squints at him. “Of course not,” he says. “What, you think all the rituals and spells are just for show?”

“...No?”

“Steven, we  _ lived together. _ Did you think I was kicking up chalk dust and getting splinters in my knees just for the hell of it?”

“Well,” Steve says, “No, but--”

It turns out that magic involves an astonishing amount of math. “ _ Of course it does,”  _ Bucky grouses. “It’s energy transfer, physics--whaddaya think I carry my formula book around for, huh?” 

“You never had no formula book back in Brooklyn,” Steve says accusingly. “And I watched you spin snowflakes since you were seven years old, Barnes--”

“That’s different, that’s little stuff,” Bucky says impatiently. “The point is--”

“ _ How _ is it different,” Steve says. 

“It depends on what you do,” Peggy says; Bucky shuts his mouth and settles for glowering. “The things you have a natural aptitude for - Sergeant Barnes and water, for example - for that, much of the less complicated work comes intuitively. However, going outside your aptitude requires a much more structured approach, along with a whole bloody lot of number-crunching. And mages just starting out can’t do anything outside simple manipulations of their aptitude.”  

“Then what the hell was the point of all that?” Steve demands, waving a hand at the scorched cement around them. “If you knew I couldn’t do it?”

“But we didn’t know,” Peggy says calmly. “We haven’t seen you in six months, after all, and your situation is unprecedented in any case. And we couldn’t start out by telling you what you should or shouldn’t be able to do, partly because we don’t know and partly because in this stage that could limit your expression.”

 

“ What you’re doing now is called unstructured expression. It’s wildly inefficient and hugely unpredictable, but it has some advantages-- you’ve noticed you have yet to burn through all your clothes, for example.” 

Steve blinks down at himself. It hadn’t even occurred to him to worry about his clothes. “I hadn’t even thought about that.”

“And that’s why it’s not happening,” Bucky explains, a tad sourly. “And why we didn’t tell you anything, either. That kinda magic doesn’t like it when you think.”

“This unstructured stuff sounds pretty good to me,” Steve says, a little defensively. 

“Yeah, right now it does,” Bucky says. “Can’t do much with it, can you, and it’s only because you’re at eight thousand horsepower that you can do it at all. Unstructured expression: very rare, huge power drain, no way to steer, and when you give magic wiggle room like that it likes to start fucking with you.”

Peggy nods, her face wholly serious now. “At the rate you’re going, we have no idea if or when you might burn out,” she says. “And that’s apart from the other problems. Spells give magic structure as well as efficiency. Unstructured magic is unpredictable. Unpredictable magic is dangerous.”

  
  


_ “All that math _ ensures that our magic gives us consistent, dependable results.

  
  


Me and Peggy-- and most everybody, actually-- can’t do anything like that. We don’t have the fuel.” 

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


Bucky goes completely still, then disappears. Steve barely holds in some startled swearing, because it used to take Bucky fifteen minutes minimum of futzing around with chalk sigils before he’d manage that. 

  
  
  


“Ma taught me,” Bucky says. “How to change your voice, your face, how to hide your tracks. How to make your spells look like other spells.” He smiles grimly. “Her ma taught her, when they were coming over from Europe.” 

“Ah, that’s bullshit,” Dugan says immediately, expansively. “It’s magic, who cares where it comes from?” 

“S’useful,” Morita says thoughtfully, watching Bucky. “Saved our asses. More than once.”

Bucky glances at him. “How’d you learn, Jim?”

“Same as you.” Morita shrugs, the cigarette moving between his lips. “Healer ma, healer sisters. They’re gonna be doctors one day while I’m stuck stitching up you ugly bastards.” 

  
  


Bucky can do other things now, too. He works with shadows now, and nighttime, and darkness, pure wild darkness out in the forests and mountains where no human lights go: the patient primordial dark. No one finds his mage’s nests and no one sees him coming. The Commandos stop running missions in daylight, Bucky’s so good with the dark. He’s become as quiet as the night he works with, as the night that works him. His eyes seem to get paler as the purpling under them deepens. 

Steve burns beside him in counterpoint. He’s a symbol, a story, the Golden Flame of America, the torch that’s lighting a fire under Hitler’s ass. He does his part in the night missions, too: he lights up and the Nazis are blinded; he lights up and the Nazis are distracted. He lights up and the Nazis are burnt alive. 

  
  
  
  


Steve finds Bucky and Peggy drinking together, sometimes. Peggy runs her own missions, sometimes disappearing for weeks, but she also joins their unit as an intelligence specialist and Resistance liaison. 

  
  


Bucky’s a mage; like snipers, they’re floaters, not permanently assigned to any one squad, and it’s only because he’s Captain America does Steve get Bucky attached to their unit and even then Bucky gets loaned out sometimes. But he gets loaned out to Peggy, primarily, or through Peggy, at least, which stings less. 

And they sit together now, sometimes, on missions or on base, silent, sharpening knives, cleaning guns, drinking. Writing in their black books. Disappearing in Howard’s labs. 

And ganging up on Steve, of course. They’ve taken it upon themselves to teach Steve more magic any moment they have more than five minutes of downtime in a row. And it turns out that Steve is  _ terrible  _ at magic. 

He can do the math just fine, but no matter how many times Bucky tries to explain  _ abstraction _ and  _ application _ he just can’t seem to get it. Peggy and Bucky eventually decide that it’s a limitation of the serum procedure, because there’s no other reason they can think of for why he just can’t seem to do any other spells.  

But his magic fire is unlike any other. It burns straight through metal, melts stone, eats up  _ wards. _

  
  
  


_ “Down,” _ Bucky bellows, tackling him, but they’re too close, it’s not enough, but  _ something  _ unfurls beneath them and Bucky drops them both into--

\--darkness, and nothing else. There’s nothing but empty dark around them, squeezing, inorganic and  _ alive,  _ and Steve knows this because Bucky knows this because in this dark there is no difference, there’s not enough  _ space _ for there to be space between them so the dark collapses them into one--

\--and they fall out again, gasping, onto wet dirt. Air rushes back into Steve’s lungs on a wheeze that sounds like a dying horse, and Bucky is panting beneath him, shivering madly. For a delirious, dizzying second it feels  _ bad, _ horrifying, it’s  _ wrong _ to be in two separate bodies again--  

Bucky coughs and shoves Steve off him. “What,” he rasps blankly, levering himself up on all fours. 

Steve looks around, and uses his keen observation skills to notice the fact that they are now no longer pinned in a bombed-out building. They are now--on a mountain. The air is cold and crisp. There’s a dusting of snow on the ground; moonlight shines through the trees. A little ways up the slope there’s a fox watching them with deep animal suspicion. 

“Bucky,” Steve says. “Bucky, did you  _ teleport us?” _

“No,” Bucky says automatically.  

“You teleported us,” Steve says accusingly. “You-- are we even still in Europe? Are we still on  _ planet Earth?” _

“What? Of course we’re on planet-- what the fuck, Steve,” Bucky snaps, but his eyes are so wide there’s white all the way around and he’s shaking. “It’s Earth, it’s Europe, it’s-- still fuckin’ Poland, probably--”

“How did you  _ do _ that?” Steve says more quietly, pushing himself up too, now that there’s a good chance they’re still in occupied territory. “Where did you even get that kind of spell?”

Bucky shrugs jerkily and stands up. “Not a spell,” he says blankly. “I just. Needed us. To be away from the grenade. And we went.”

Steve is still staring at Bucky, still caught in that moment of inbetweentime, the terrible airless pressure, where they hadn’t been Steve and Bucky but something else with no body no brain just  _ them,  _ one thing, all together _. _ “You can do that?”

_ “Apparently.”  _ Bucky scowls. “Fucking  _ magic.” _

“Yeah, okay, but  _ teleporting? _ How?”

Bucky waves a hand, irritable. “It’s all-- connected, all of it, the dark, I don’t know,” he says sourly. “How does any magic do anything? I look like a professor to you? Huh? C’mon, we need to find which way north is.” 

 

Bucky stops shaking, but his face gets greyer and greyer and he starts stumbling less than five minutes up the mountain. Steve grabs for him, half-picking him up, and Bucky’s feeble attempts to shake him off only make Steve more alarmed. “Stoppit,” Bucky mumbles, but his eyelids are fluttering. “M’fine.”

“Sure you are,” Steve says, and slings Bucky over his shoulders, keeping one hand on his wrist to take his pulse: too fast but steady enough. Steve really hopes this is only magical exhaustion; it’s the most likely answer, given that Steve himself feels fine and in no way adversely affected by their little trip through the dark. “C’mon, pal, let me take you up a mountain.”

  
  
  
  


“Steve,” he says, then stops. 

Steve looks at him. Bucky looks pale, paler than usual, and the skin under his eyes is the color of bruised fruit. But Bucky meets his eyes steadily enough. “What I did,” he says. “You can’t put it in the report.”

And Steve already knows, is the thing. “Unstructured expression,” he says softly.

Bucky nods once, ducking his head. “I shouldn’t be able to do that. I  _ can’t do that _ , do you understand?” 

Steve doesn’t break his gaze. “Sergeant Barnes and I were late to rendezvous due to an injury I sustained during the skirmish at WHAT FUCKING TOWN IN POLAND. Gunshot wound, left thigh,” he says, in his Captain America Reporting On The Front voice. “We were able to hole up long enough for the wound to heal and made rendezvous with the unit as soon as we were mobile. 

  
  


“I  _ shouldn’t be able to do that.” _

“Remember that one time you took that one accounting class as a favor to your ma? And you got so good you replaced the professor on his sick days? Yeah," Steve says. “This is exactly like that. You’ve always been better than you thought you were.”

 

“Was it bad? Did it hurt?”

Bucky shakes his head, slowly. “

 

Steve doesn’t say that tactically, this is a goddamn goldmine. If Bucky can teleport on command, if he can learn to direct it, even just to take one or two people-- then the damage they can do multiplies exponentially. He doesn’t say anything. Bucky knows. 

  
  


Bucky takes a deep breath. “I could. Do it again. Maybe.”

Steve stares at him. “Oh yeah,” he says. “Yeah, let’s push for that, for some crazy maybe-possibility that involves  _ you passing out for two days every time you do it. _ Don’t you dare, Buck. You could burn out. I need my sergeant.” 

  
  


“I don’t think it would’ve worked with anyone but you,” Bucky says quietly. “I think it’ll kill anyone but you.”

“Because of the serum?” Steve says, even as he knows that’s not it. 

Bucky cuts him a look. “That too, maybe,” he says. “But what do you think happens, when I take somebody I don’t like into the dark?”

  
  
  
  
  
  


Morita gives Bucky a strange look. “What did you do to him?”

“Froze some of the blood in his throat,” Bucky says. His hands don’t shake as he lights a cigarette. 

“Looks like it froze into spikes,” Morita says, speaking just a little bit more slowly than usual. “Tore through the skin.”

“Icicles will do that,” Bucky says, taking a drag. Nobody mentions that what he just did technically counts as a war crime.

 

Steve aches to go over to him, grab him by the back of his neck, shake him hard, kiss him harder. Steve thinks,  _ you used to make snowflakes,  _ and the fire inside him burns hotter. 

 

But not hot enough. 

 

Bucky falls, and Steve can’t stop it, his miracle body, his phoenix fire, it’s not enough. He remembers thinking, dully, in the bar, that the fire is gone now, will never light again, because he can’t feel it anymore, not like before. Now it’s all fire. Everything hurts. 

But magic, perverse, does the opposite instead. He stops being able to shut it off. He reports in the day after and goes into the debrief and listens to the Colonel and the others, talking noises, the world turns, they’re still at war, and his magic ignites again of its own accord. He doesn’t notice until they all go quiet and look at him and he sees his flickering hands. 

“Son?” Phillips says. 

“What’s my next mission,” Steve says. “Sir.”

“Son,” Phillips says. 

The wood is starting to char under Steve’s fingers. “What’s the  _ mission.” _

Phillips is wise enough to give it to him, and keep giving them. The Commandos’ success rate was good before, but now they’re driven: Bucky was theirs too. Morita clams up, Jones and Frenchie barely bother with English anymore, the fuse on Dugan’s temper halves and Monty’s started playing with his food a little before he kills them. Steve can barely care; Steve can barely  _ see. _

Nobody touches him anymore, not even Peggy. They know better. He wasn’t enough, and now nothing else is, either: not victory, not death, he wants farther faster  _ now,  _ if he slows down he’ll detonate and it’s a miracle he can still think something like  _ not on base, it’ll kill all the wrong people _ . Mission accomplished isn’t the fucking goal anymore. He goes out for blood and gets it. Wrath is a sin but he can’t stop burning and by  _ God, _ Hydra will burn with him.  

No more stealth missions for them, not with Steve lit up like a walking funeral pyre. No more nighttime. Hydra sees them coming but it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter, there are no survivors, Steve _ doesn’t care.  _

But then he gets on the plane, and it turns out he still cares enough not to turn the Valkyrie into a meteor and release God knows what kind of radiation and poison onto anyone living below. Peggy calls for him and-- he grieves then, for a moment, for her and for who he’s been-- he’s been awful, oh God, Peggy--but he can’t-- he can’t--  

Here comes the ice. 

 

The ice does this much: it puts his fire out. When he wakes and sees his arms free of flames he knows he’s died, but then the rest of the little scene filters in and no, he’s still alive, in a bizarre loud bright pretend future he’d never dreamed of, hadn’t wanted to dream of, but here he is. Still kicking. 

He looks almost normal, now. The fire comes when called and goes away quietly, a dog broken to heel, and that more than anything unsettles him. Steve is wary of his magic for the first time in his life, because fire isn't tame, let alone  _ magic _ fire, and his unnatural inferno is in a class of its own. When he calls it up now it comes with the dull, half-formed feeling of something-- waiting, almost. Dormant. 

 

The ice did one more thing to him: it changed his colors. His flames are blue-white now, right where they touch his skin. It gives him a halo the color of frozen seawater, an inch of cold before the flames go gold again. From far away it just looks white, another kind of brightness, but up close there’s no denying that at the core of him Steve burns cold. 

  
  
  
  


Natasha is a spy like Peggy, but her aptitude is fire like Steve’s. Well, not quite like Steve’s: she uses hers as heat, invisible until it cooks you. Her control is so fine that she can sustain a nine hundred degree thermal lance less than two millimeters in diameter. Steve sees her use it for everything from cauterizing wounds to melting locks off with one fingertip.  

She also does the full-body shapeshifting thing, which seems to unnerve most of Strike, but both Bucky and Peggy had been able to do that and Steve doesn’t even blink. He also enjoys Natasha’s wild frustration with him, because she loves to prank people by pretending to be someone else and it never works on Steve. She’s been Fury, Hill, Clint, Tony, Pepper, Marco the janitor and Lillian from Accounting, and she never, ever gets him and it drives her  _ crazy  _ because she has no idea why.

One day Steve will tell her that it’s a supersoldier thing: he can hear it, the way her footsteps are too light for someone who’s over six feet or more than her hundred-odd pounds, and he can smell her, her shampoo and deodorant and skin-scent that doesn’t change no matter who she’s wearing. He’s reasonably certain even a human with bat ears and a very good nose wouldn’t be able to pick her out like that with this kind of accuracy. 

He thinks Natasha’s figured out it’s a serum thing, anyway, otherwise she would have cornered him and demanded answers just in case it was something an enemy agent could pick up on.  

  
  
  
  


His heartbeat had slowed to the point where it was only going at something like one beat every nine or so minutes, the doctors had told him. His blood hadn’t frozen, not all the way, although they did note that there had been tissue damage, especially to the extremities, that had only begun to recede when they’d thawed him out again. They told him his healing factor had been slow to kick in at first, then faster and faster, until there was no sign of frostbite and his body temperature was his usual, running a flat hundred degrees fahrenheit, same as it always had been since the serum. 

They said his pulse had picked right back up again along with his brain activity, healthy as a horse, but Steve hadn’t been convinced. The big, jarring changes were easy, almost, in comparison to the little things, the little details that just weren’t quite right, like a ball game he’d already been to playing again in the wrong century. 

 

More often than not he felt that he was still there-- if not still in the ice, then at least underwater, deep down where the light didn’t reach and all sound was distorted beyond all recognition. At least combat’s the same. The guns change, the uniforms, the war zones, but at the end of the day humans have a pretty standardized set of maneuvers for killing each other. And Steve’s pretty fucking good at all of them, now.  

  
  
  
  
  
  


On cloudy days Steve goes out on his bike, drives until the sun sets and he’s riding the canyon of the grey-lit modern highway with nothing but trees looming up on either side. He pulls off the highway then, goes further and further on back roads until his bike’s the only light for miles. He parks. He shuts his lights off. He leaves his little telephone in his pocket. He walks into the woods, and sits on the ground, and closes his eyes. 

With the overcast sky, there’s not even moon or stars. No light. It’s the closest he can get to the true darkness, Bucky’s darkness, where the distance between them was collapsed to none.  

  
  
  


“Okay, look,” Sam says. “I gotta ask you a real deep personal question, man , I gotta know. It’s been eating at me practically my whole life. Why don’t all your clothes burn off when you light up like that?”

Steve stares at him. Then he starts laughing, and he doesn't stop laughing until he's rolling on the ground, staring up at the sky with his arms holding his stomach and Sam’s grin leaning over him going, "C'mon, man, answer the question! Answer the question!"

“Gimme your number,” he tells Sam. He’s still chuckling, a little. It feels good.  

Sam scrunches up his face, sitting down next to him. “What? What kind of answer is that?”

“I don’t know why they don’t burn, I’m not a technomancer.” Steve turns his head to look directly at Sam, oddly comfortable in the damp grass with an acorn digging into his left ass cheek. “Gimme your number.”

Sam just looks at him for a moment, his smile fading off his face and his eyes very quiet, but then the grin starts to come back. “Man, did Captain America just hit on me?”

Steve raises his eyebrows. “Who?”

Sam’s eyes mock-widen. “He didn’t? Does that mean  _ Steve Rogers _ just hit on me?” 

Steve sniffs. “Well if you’re gonna be like  _ that--” _

Sam presses a hand to his chest and closes his eyes. “Jesus. Are you seeing this. First he runs me half to death and then he expects to get my number?” 

“Well you’re the one who got all upset that my clothes stay on all the time,” Steve says reasonably, and it’s Sam’s turn to roll onto his side laughing. 

“Man, I didn’t know you were fun,” he gasps, his hand over his heart again. “Nobody ever told me you’d be fun. Yeah, alright, Rogers, I’ll give you my number.”

  
  
  


“When Bucky died,” Steve says. The tree outside shifts in the wind, making shadow patterns ripple across Sam’s bedroom ceiling. “When Bucky died, I-- couldn’t shut the fire off. I couldn’t hold files, or guns, or walk into a tent. Everything burned. We couldn’t do stealth missions anymore. I slept on the ground in camp, out by the motor pool. When I ate it had to be in my mouth quick, before it charred. The Captain America uniform was the only thing that didn’t burn.” 

  
  
  
  
  
  


“How do you keep a mage on a leash?” Natasha says, distant. “You fuck with their head. Until they don’t know up from down, or right from wrong.”

  
  
  


Steve tries not to light up at all. He doesn’t want to burn Bucky. 

 

Bucky’s using barely any magic either, which is chillingly unlike him. He had been a mage first and foremost in combat, a methodical, precise planner, specializing in exploiting weaknesses and taking out his targets from a distance. 

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


“Bucky’s gonna come find me,” Steve says quietly. “And when he does, he’s gonna need backup.”

“Alright, Cap,” Sam says. “Where do we start?”

  
  
  
  
  


“Our unit’s main goal was sabotage,” Steve says. “We were covert ops, going behind enemy lines and destroying targets, gathering intel. Morita and Bucky were our mages-- medic and illusionist. Officially, anyway. Bucky was responsible for keeping our covert ops covert--” Steve stepped forward, carefully, and used the edge of his shield to

“--but what he was  _ really  _ good at was laying traps.” 

 

“He could make spells look and feel like other spells. Whenever we’d blow a base he’d booby-trap the rubble with pressure differentials, except they read like fragments of the Nazis’ own warding spells, leftover magical residue. We’d try to leave parts of the bases standing, just for that, so when they came looking for what happened, for anything they could salvage, they’d get blown up.” 

 

Steve rubs his face. “Every village we’d go to, if there were girls and we had a couple of hours, Bucky would spell necklaces for them-- pieces of wire and string, sometimes. Read like a good health charm, but if you took it off and threw it and said the right word they’d explode. He did a lot of work for the Resistance.”

 

Steve had known that devastating efficiency firsthand. After that, the Winter Soldier’s head-on collisions just seemed-- desperate. 

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


The cats all turn towards them at once, heads swiveling in eerie synchronicity. 

  
  
  
  
  
  
  


Steve doesn’t think, just throws himself bodily into the dark.There’s a split second of Sam bellowing something but then it’s gone, empty night sealing behind him, and  _ there he is, _ no air no sight no sound and all around him is--  _ Bucky? _ \-- and it’s startled, it wasn’t expecting him, and for one glorious moment Steve is immolated in Bucky’s recognition, his acknowledgment, his exasperation.  

Then the dark spits him back out again, like a disgruntled cat with a giant hairball. Steve lands sprawling on his ass at Sam’s feet, the darkspot shrinking to nothing before his eyes. “Hey!”

_ “Steve, _ ” Sam says, as Natasha comes skidding to a stop beside them, her face even paler than usual. 

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


The helicarriers burn. Sirens echo back and forth across the Potomac. A wave, bigger than it should be, slops out of the river and drags a limp body to the shore. It catches on the muddy bank and slumps on its side, coughing. The dirty water has stained the red white and blue into new colors, none of them lighter than old blood. 

The body lies limp until a crew of medics fights through the riverside brush, guided by a rescue helicopter. They comb up and down the banks, but they find no other survivors. 

  
  


All rivers flow into the ocean. 

 

He opens his eyes to blue sky and grey-green water. 

 

His lips are raw with salt. His eyelashes are crusted with it. There isn’t a single spell on him, not one.

 

There isn’t much that can stand up to salt water, and nothing that can stand for long. It’s the surest method of spellbreaking, and the oldest. It takes a long, long time, but how long as he been there, underneath the water? 

 

He should have drowned in the river. He doesn’t. They both should have drowned in the river.

They don’t.

He gets up to his feet, boots sliding in fine sand. He starts to walk up the beach. 

 

He doesn’t get far. He starts coughing before he even leaves the sand. He doesn’t know where he’s going except for that he does: wavering echoes whisper all around him, and he follows the clearest one. It’s not long before his boots slip down the muddy bank of a stream, petering out just a few hundred yards behind him into ocean. 

He falls to his knees. There are no spells on him. No illusions, no wards. No shackles or bonds or compulsions. No medical spells, keeping the processes of his body in equilibrium. Nothing to keep the coughing from doubling him over, spit bubbling up pink from his mouth. 

 

He lies down in the water. 

 

SWITCH OUT BELOW FOR OCEAN? DOESN’T MKE SENSE

It’s shallow but quick, cold, clear: fast water, mountain water. The Potomac had worn down the edges of some of the major spells on him, but it was too big, too polluted, too lazy and slow to do more than leave a layer of decay on the magic, like a coat of rust. This stream will do more. More still if he calls for it. 

 

What he is doing is bad. These spells are not supposed to come off. These spells are on him always, and he is doing a bad thing. 

But something got chewed loose inside, up in the burning helicarrier, or maybe down in the boiling river, because he doesn’t care. He doesn’t care. He is going to be bad.  

 

He turns his head, putting one half of his face in the stream. He can hear it, rushing along, soaking him all over, sinking into every crack and pore. Hungry. It’s barely effort at all to invite it in. 

 

The water rises, eager, and he closes his eyes. He will have to lay here for a while, a long while, because as the oldest and most surefire method of spellbreaking, it is of course the one that takes the most time. 

  
  


Out of the corner of his eye, he can see darkness welling up around him. It laps at his edges, soothing, looking for a way in. The whole stream runs black now, all the water, black as ink. It slides through his hair and behind his knees and between his toes. It’s warm. Humming. 

He turns his cheek into it. He isn’t supposed to. The handlers don’t like it. They don’t like what the dark does for him, what it tries to do, the way it wraps around him like a big warm animal and makes him erratic and unmanageable. So he doesn’t let it, mostly, he turns away, because they must have their reasons and it’s not for him. 

But he is being bad now. 

He opens his mouth again, and drinks. 

 

Salt water. The oldest method of spellbreaking, and the surest, if you have the time. 

Barnes has the time. He gave himself to the ocean completely.

 

The dark water slides down his throat, slick as oil, and plunges deeper. 

 

He rolls and retches again, and this time  _ plenty _ comes up. The Glock drops into the mud as he shudders, heaving, propped on his elbows. He vomits yellow, pink, grey-green; thick slime, rotted and rusting. He vomits up bones, bullets, scalpel blades. A handful of screws, mixed in with knots of surgical thread and carried on what smells like diesel. Plastic zip ties. Bits of safety glass. Nearly six yards of tangled-up fishing line. And that’s only the shit he recognizes.

At some point a long, braided string of wire comes up, half-corroded and dripping orange goo, scratching up the walls of his esophagus. The metal is etched with tiny symbols; he rips the thing apart with his metal hand, clumsy and trembling. He doesn’t want to know where that was buried in him, what part of his body it was wrapped around.

 

When he opens his eyes again, the sky is-- further away? He sits up, and sees that while the stream is still just a trickling creek, the banks of the little gully are much, much higher than before. The gravel and dirt looks-- scarred, almost, like the water passing through it had angry claws and teeth. 

He blinks stupidly for a long moment. Either something happened here recently or he was out for a lot longer than a few hours. He’s been unconscious for years before, he knows, but usually he has to be encased in ice for that to happen. 

He staggers to his feet, and sees that upstream of him, the creek is still flat and shallow. He turns: downstream, the water passing him practically carved a canyon. 

He licks his lips. He feels-- lighter. All the spells on him are gone. He kneels down, awkward with stiffness, and touches his mouth to the stream. He drinks in the cold, clear water. 

 

He’s starving but he feels more full than ever before. There’s more in him now, more  _ of  _ him. He feels-- connected to himself. His body. A circuit inside of him has closed. He drank the black water and let it in, in, in, down inside. 

So far, being bad is going pretty good. 

 

The handlers didn’t like him tasting the dark because it’s not their friend. It’s his. 

  
  
  
  
  
  
  


**Is this even a workable storyline? Subplot, excise later**

 

He wakes on the third day with something warm pressed up close in his right armpit. When he scrambles away it trills angrily and rolls too, coming up hissing. 

They stare at each other, braced in almost identical three-point positions, Barnes with his metal arm poised and the cat with one paw in the air. 

Barnes pushes off the ground to stand upright. The cat fluffs up and makes an angry teakettle noise but doesn’t bolt. It’s not very big-- a kitten, really, he realizes. It’s so dark brown it’s almost black, with yellow eyes and short, dirty fur. 

  
  
  
  


To be a mage requires power, will and control. HYDRA didn’t exactly like for him to have any of those, or at least not any they couldn’t take away any time they chose. He had a few very basic pyro spells that could scale laterally, but those were pretty much the equivalent of shrapnel-free grenades. Water does a lot for him, but   

 

He needs to expand his spell arsenal: ice and fire aren’t enough, for the work he plans to be doing. 

  
  


He learns a lot of spells, and more often than not finds out he’s  _ re _ -learning them. Halfway through the steps he’ll realize he  _ knows  _ this, and knows how to do it more efficiently besides. 

It’s incredibly frustrating. He spends weeks with a particularly strong something-missing itch, scratching spell formulas into dirt and sand with one finger, until he gets a cheap green notebook and the itch turns into a  _ different _ something-missing. It takes him an embarrassingly long time to figure out he’s  _ missing his goddamn mage book. _ He’s an idiot. Bucky Barnes was a combat mage in the war, of fuckin’ course he’d have a black book stuffed end to end with more useful spells than the damn Tactical Codex. 

He  _ really _ wants that book back _. Fuck  _ the Nazis. He hopes they didn’t manage to recover it with the rest of his body and if they did, they couldn’t crack the cipher. It’s unlikely, given he kept in in a very secure inside pocket on him at all times and his cipher wasn’t anything groundbreaking, but maybe he bled all over it or something and rendered it illegible. A brainwashed cyborg assassin can dream.

Those were  _ his spells. _

His new notebook is dark green, with cheap, thin pages and a shitty plastic cover. He’ll have to get a new one within a week, at the rate he’s going, and if he doesn’t it’ll probably fall apart in two. He waterproofs, fireproofs and booby traps the hell out of it anyway. 

He quickly learns that baffled rage is an intrinsic part of learning magic, not just something specific to him and his deep-fried brain. There are whole sites dedicated to learning spells, and acres of forums for troubleshooting, advice, resource sharing, and most popularly, complaining.  _ MY SPELL DOESN’T WORK. I HAVE NO IDEA WHY, _ a caption reads, on a photo of a man with this head in his hands, a chalk circle in front of him. Same photo right below it:  _ MY SPELL WORKS. I HAVE NO IDEA WHY. _

“Check your fucking math,” Barnes mutters. Clearly none of these kids ever had to train under live-fire conditions. If your spell didn’t go right the first time there wouldn’t  _ be  _ a second time. 

It’s all incredibly annoying. The majority of the spells available to the public are generally a vast disappointment, after his usual, but his usual is typically classified to the moon and back due to all of it being incredibly fucking lethal. The most recent version of the Tactical Codex released to the public is from 1972 and getting an updated copy would be a gigantic pain in the ass.

So he ends up modifying civilian spells, partly because it feels familiar and partly because there are about a billion little useful do-it-yourself spell blogs run by an endless army of hedgewitch housewives across the world. 

That’s how he becomes a regular reader of Hera’s Hearth, Witch Sans Broomstick, Hex and the City and Magic Mommy: the blog. Plenty of their spells lend themselves to gratuitous violence, and Magic Mommy’s  _ Mess-Be-Gone!  _ tag is very helpful now that Barnes has to do the majority of his own kill-site cleanups.

 

_ Don’t forget to set the temperature value under 60 degrees!  _ Magic Mommy writes.  _ Don’t want to give anybody any ouchies.  _ Barnes cranks it up to 6,000 and uses it as a portable welder and flesh-melting thermal lance. Ouchies abound. 

  
  
  


He also types in  _ how do i make my hair stop  _ and discovers the world of shampoo. And conditioner. And hair ties, bandanas, barrettes, braids, detangling spray and argan oil. Blowdryers. Hair masks. Mousse. Brushes with scalp-massaging bristles on them. Convenience store self-care aisles gain the power to captivate him for hours on end and he has to watch himself accordingly. 

On the other hand, he’s much cleaner now. His hair smells of cucumbers and mint. And he can leave relevant comments on some of Magic Mommy’s articles as a way to thank her without saying  _ your freeze-drying food spell is an excellent way to make sure corpses don’t get discovered for weeks.  _

_ your spells dries my hair really nice, _ he types instead, slow and slightly awkward because his metal thumb doesn’t register on his phone screen.  _ i dont have hairdryer so thank you very much. _

  
  
  
  
  


There are spells out there for improving memory. For returning what is lost. He leaves them the hell alone. His brain feels delicate, fragile, when it’s not slopping over with white-hot rage. He’s not going to fuck with it for love nor money. 

  
  
  


There are spells to forget, too. Those are much, much harder to stay away from. 

 

There are spells out there to forget. 

But they’re wholesale, they’re all-or-nothing: he can erase years and years and years but he gets nothing back. Clean slate. 

 

And what if he fine-tunes it? He could do it, he’s that good. What if he can pick himself apart, unspool his mind like his Ma unwove knitting, take out the tangles and weave it back together? What then? Delete what he doesn’t like, leave the rest-- just like what HYDRA did. Remake himself in his own image. Would it be so bad, with his own hand at the controls? 

He thinks of looking at his metal arm and not knowing how he got it. He thinks of looking in the mirror and not recognizing the face looking back. When he thinks of how it would feel, he doesn’t have to use his imagination. 

Why even bother casting a spell. If he wants to erase himself so bad then he can do it a whole lot faster by putting his Glock in his mouth and pulling the trigger. 

And he’s not going to do that. He’s not going to do that. He earned his scars, he paid in blood, it’s  _ his.  _ He didn’t want it, didn’t ask for it, but god help anyone who tries to take it back. 

It’s hard, it hurts, he hates it. But he’s too fucking angry to die. 

 

“You can’t choose,” he rasps aloud, his voice shaking with rage. “You can’t choose.” It’s not fair. It’s not fair. It’s not  _ fair. _

  
  
  
  
  
  


He wakes up to high-pitched wailing and the cat scrambling towards him just as the first flashbangs crash in through the upper windows. 

 

There’s no time: he grabs his bag, scoops up the cat and scrambles for the fire ladder - except the catwalk is filling with men, boots hammering on the metal. He whirls: no exit. The cait yowls, all four sets of claws sunk into his arm. He clutches her tighter. No exit. 

He drops into the dark. 

 

He comes up gasping, feeling like he ran twenty miles in two seconds, and the cat flails away from him as he falls on all fours. They’re under an overpass, god alone knows where. It’s still nighttime, at least. The dull swish of the occasional car passes overhead. 

 

Barnes freezes. He knows his memory’s not good, but-- he could’ve sworn the cat’s eyes had been yellow. 

He stares. No one really knows for sure what makes familiars beyond a vague, wobbly umbrella term of “magical accidents”. Just casting spells on animals doesn’t do it, even binding spells, otherwise zookeepers and vets around the world would have whole packs of them. In all the stories, it usually only happens when a powerful spell goes horribly wrong. 

Apparently pulling the animal into a quantum void portal counts as a spell gone horribly wrong. How’s that for reassuring.

The cat slowly, gently puts a paw over his mouth, as if preemptively shushing him. 

“God damn it _ ,”  _ Barnes says anyway. 

 

Over the next hour he learns that yes, the cat is definitely his familiar, and no, it is not helpful in the slightest. Taking an up-close photo of his own eyes reveals that he has slit pupils now, but given his night vision was already flawless, this does fuckall besides give him one more thing to cover up in public. His reflexes and sense of smell have improved slightly, which is kind of nice, but that’s undermined by how his attention is brutally hijacked whenever something small twitches in his peripheral vision. As if he needed to be  _ more _ of a jumpy nutcase. 

On a hunch, he climbs into a tree, closes his eyes and falls out of it, dead weight. Somewhere in there new protocols take over and he lands on his feet, crouched to spring. 

He’s not sure how he feels about that either. He’s a little tired of his body being more in control than his brain. 

The cat watches him the whole time. It followed him to the tree, sitting down to supervise his experiments.

In all the stories, familiars are helpful, smart animals that understand simple commands and do what they’re told. But this is a cat. Barnes knows cats. Like hell is this thing going to follow orders. 

 

“Do I have to name you now,” Barnes says. 

The cat gives him a look of utter disdain, which makes Barnes narrow his eyes right back. “Your name is Schrodinger,” he says. “Because I don’t know your cat name. And I can’t name you Cat. And I can’t be Schrodinger. Because I already have a name. I think.”

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


HYDRA’s vaults contain spellbooks, too. 

He finds he’s already learned most of these as well, to his total lack of surprise. These are not Magic Mommy spells. These are not simple energy transfers that can be modified to do damage, like household chemicals can be mixed into bombs. These spells are war crimes.

Barnes copies them out neatly into his book, every one, adding his own notes as he goes. The original Barnes never had anything like this. Some of this magic is thousands of years old. 

And locked away for good reason. Barnes tests one of the lower-powered ones on a HYDRA agent he’s done interrogating and what’s left afterward can barely be called a corpse. It also costs him, as most curses do: this one needed a lock of hair and a palmful of blood, on top of the energy transfer. 

Barnes toes the steaming puddle of former HYDRA agent with his boot, frowning. Using this curse on one person is perhaps overkill. It’s not any more satisfying than killing by freezing the blood, or creating an unstable pressure differential in the skull. Their heads all explode either way, really. 

He leaves most of the purely destructive curses alone, after that. His modified spells are much more efficient, especially in melee combat. 

He finds several codexes of advanced warding spells, however, that prove to be infinitely useful. He takes photos of every page and reads on his phone until his eyes blur, curled up in crawl spaces or freight train cars or chimney thickets with Schrodinger in his lap. 

  
  
  
  
  
  


He cuts off a chunk of hair, ties it into a knot and soaks it in his blood. Then comes the water: Barnes sticks his other hand into the cistern and watches the water shiver and twitch and then change, darkness like ink spreading from edge to edge. He plunges the bloodied knot into the pool and feels the dark begin to coalesce around his fist. 

What he drags out of there is a body, not quite a corpse. Its features are blurred and ill-defined, its limbs limp and slapping wetly against the ground. Barnes cups what could be called a face and breathes into what might have been a mouth. 

A slow, dark pulse passes once through the room. He lets go and leans back, slowly. The thing sits up. It’s unmistakably him now: white face, square jaw, lank hair. Its dark body ripples for a few seconds as it copies his tac jacket and pants and boots. It doesn’t really have eyes, but it looks at him all the same. 

 

It’s not a golem: it’s dumber than that, and weaker too. More fragile. But it can store information, a little, and it can damn well serve as a decoy. 

 

Schrodinger wanders up to it and rubs her face on the thing’s hip.    
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


**STEVE**

  
  


The thing that isn’t Bucky turns toward them, the motion eerily dreamlike. It loses definition around its edges, shadows bleeding into the gloom around them. Its eyes are sunken black pools.

Steve takes a step forward.

Sam flings his arm out. “Don’t you dare.”

“It’s okay, Sam,” Steve murmurs. “That’s him. That’s his magic.”

“ _ Rogers,” _ Natasha barks. “You don’t know it’s his. Hydra had him for decades.”

The Not-Bucky thing turns its head towards her.

 

“Steve, you’re acting  _ drugged.”  _

 

Up close, it’s unmistakably not Bucky. Steve can see coils of darkness shifting under its bone-white skin. Its features are Bucky’s, but-- too tight, almost, waxy and unreal. Its face is solemn, almost somber. When it puts its hands on either side of his jaw, it feels like being touched by dry water. 

It leans in, dreamlike, and kisses him gently on the mouth.

Steve doesn’t hear Sam or Natasha; he knows they’re making noises, but it all sounds far away and underwater. Not-Bucky’s cool, slick tongue slips into his mouth, and then--

Steve drinks. 

“Oh,” he breathes, as Not-Bucky pulls away. “Are you sure?”

Not-Bucky nods, its hands sliding off Steve’s face to loop its arms around his shoulders. Steve’s aware of Sam and Natasha-- they’re hovering a few feet away, Sam concerned, Natasha furious with one hand holding Sam back. 

“Just a second,” he tells them distractedly. “I just have to-- are you sure?” he asks Not-Bucky again.

Not-Bucky lays its head on Steve’s shoulder.

“All right,” Steve says quietly. “I don’t know if this will hurt, but. I’ll go fast.”

He wraps an arm around Not-Bucky’s waist. It feels solid, firm, just like real flesh. Taking a deep breath, he plunges his free hand into its torso, under the ribs, aiming for the heart. 

He finds it quick-- a damp, rough knot amid the cool slickness of the rest of its body-- and yanks. 

Not-Bucky gives a soft little sigh and dissolves, watery black smoke collapsing in Steve’s arms. He’s left holding a sticky, blood-drenched knot of human hair. 

Sam and Natasha stare at him. The blood drips onto the floor, no longer constrained by its shell of shadows. Steve glances back down at the tangle in his palm; he makes a fist, and a moment later it ignites, burning neon blue for a second before going gold and then crisping into ash. 

“What,” Sam says, “the fuck.”

“I have the coordinates for--” Steve thinks for a second, “--six HYDRA bases. Buck can’t take ‘em, I think he’s doing something else. 

  
  


“Metal arm, fucked-up head, can’t kill me ‘cause I’m already dead,” Barnes half-sings under his breath.

He’s not supposed to exist. He’s a ghost.

“Boo,” he whispers. 

  
  
  


Barnes considers the facts at hand. She is the Black Widow, the only one left alive. That alone is a formidable set of qualifications. She is an Avenger; she keeps up with Steve but doesn’t share his blind spots. If Barnes had to rank his threats, she would be sitting at the top like a queen. 

But then again, Barnes is a monster of a very different caliber. He’s not sure he can be  _ put down _ at all. 

“Don’t try,” he decides. “I’ve died before and it doesn’t take. And what comes back is worse.”

  
  
  
  
  


“And he posts under the name SchrodingersCatTree.”

  
  
  
  


“You used to make snowflakes,” Steve says. 

“I also used to make giant icicles shaped like cocks,” Bucky says pensively. “Probably more often than the snowflakes.”  

  
  


SO LIKE IS THERE A PLOT? AT ALL?

  
  
  


“I’m better at kinetics now.”

“Of course you are,” Steve says, staring. “Of fucking course you are.”

  
  


"it's the goddamn snowflakes all over again," steve's taken to saying, complete with hands on his hips and a headshake, whenever bucky manages to completely master something over the duration of like one online course or from watching like.  a documentary

MARY-SUE ITIS 

IT'S AN ILLNESS

HE'S ILL

the ILLEST

**Author's Note:**

> bonus excerpts from me + valiant proofreader, from when i thought i might actually finish this:
> 
> Sam @ clint, the hawk shapeshifter: so like if you're mid-poop and you wanna turn into a bird, does the shit turn into small bird shit or do you just shit a really big human shit? proportional to your body? do you tear your own ass apart?
> 
> “yer a wizord borky” steve whippesersd  
> “no stev i’m gay” bucky hooted
> 
> how pretentious can we make the title   
> let’s go FULL LATIN  
> JESUS CHRSIT THE LATIN write it in cyrillic letters  
> I HATE YOU


End file.
